


Easy From the Outside

by paperstorm



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Canon Divergence - Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Natasha watches Stucky be in love, POV Natasha Romanov, POV Outsider, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Romance, Voyeurism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-20
Updated: 2018-10-20
Packaged: 2019-08-04 19:06:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16352447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperstorm/pseuds/paperstorm
Summary: Tony and Steve draw a tenuous truce, enough to repair what's been broken and bring the Avengers back together. Bucky is healed in Wakanda, and then brought to the Avengers headquarters to be with Steve. Unsure of whether they can trust him, Natasha employs her abilities as a spy and keeps an eye on him. She sees a lot more than she bargained for.





	Easy From the Outside

**Author's Note:**

> Title is from the song “Sellouts” by Breathe Carolina

Everyone is tense and nervous, the day of the transfer. No one says it out loud, but it isn’t difficult to figure out. Natasha sits, legs crossed and fingers rapping on the kitchen table. Wanda sits across from her, idly moving glowing energy between her fingers like it’s a nervous tick, like her version of a stress ball. Clint is leaning against the counter with his arms crossed. Sam is pacing. Vision is the only one in the room who looks calm, but that’s because he isn’t human and he always looks calm. The rest of them look like a scene in a hospital waiting room from a dramatic procedural crime drama after one of their team members had been shot. Waiting, waiting, in an uncomfortable environment for news that might be the worst. Even though in reality, this is their home, and they aren’t waiting for news at all. They already know everything they need to. Trouble is, several of the people in this room have vivid, recent memories of the man who is about to join them shooting  _at_  them, instead of aiming bullets at bad guys alongside them. The ones who were never on the receiving end of his particular talent for ending lives, have heard the stories.  
   
Clint finally breaks the silence. “The Wakandan Princess fixed him. Cap said so. We don’t need to be worried he’s about to burst in here and start stabbing.”  
   
“I chased this guy almost literally across the whole world,” Sam says. “He’s got issues but he isn’t dangerous anymore, if the Princess got all those trigger words out of his head. I wouldn’t let him come here if he was gonna be a threat.”  
   
It’s an empty, useless statement, because Sam has no power here. Steve might be their Captain in the field and Sam might have become his equivalent of a First Mate, but in this building, Tony calls the shots. He always has.  
   
“Perhaps the tension is more due to the fact that a few short months ago, we were on opposing sides of a fight against each other,” Vision muses, and he’s right about that of course but it didn’t need to be said.  
   
“We’re all fine,” Natasha says. “Right? That was a mess, and we were all wrong, and we’re putting it behind us.”  
   
“Do you think we can?” Wanda asks quietly.  
   
“It isn’t a matter of whether we can. If we’re gonna be the Avengers again, we have to. So we get it done.” Natasha looks from teammate to teammate, confirming it with all of them individually.  
   
Clint uncrosses his arms, and then recrosses them and sighs. “What about Barnes?”  
   
“Steve says he’s safe,” Sam reminds them.  
   
“I think he’s earned the right to be here,” Wanda says, her voice still soft, and still staring methodically at the light moving between her fingers. “He’s been through things that we can all relate to, hasn’t he. Being experimented on, tortured and brainwashed, used as a weapon, treated like he isn’t human. Losing the people he cared about. This place is supposed to be a haven for misfits and second chances. Isn’t it? Isn’t that what we all are? People who wouldn’t fit in anywhere else? I think Sergeant Barnes belongs here just as much as the rest of us.”  
   
“So, you’ve read my résumé,” a low voice says from the doorway.  
   
Natasha looks up. Barnes is between Steve and Tony, looking as uncomfortable as the rest of them. His hair is longer than the last time Natasha saw him, half of it pulled back  and strands falling over his face. He’s in dark pants and a light linen shirt, with a cut of red cloth tied across his chest to cover his lack of a left arm. It hadn’t occurred to Natasha that he wouldn’t show up with a new metal one, but if he isn’t planning on fighting anymore, she supposes he doesn’t need one. The memory of that arm around her throat is all too easy to draw up in her mind, so it’s all just as well he doesn’t have it anymore. He looks much healthier than he did months ago. Cleaner and brighter and rested, skin bronzed from the African sun.  
   
“Thank you, Wanda,” Steve says, smiling genuinely at her.  
   
“Alright, listen up, kids.” Tony claps his hands together and grins at them, in that wolfish way of his that is somehow sincere and sarcastic all at once. “Mommy and Daddy had a long talk on the ride over here, and we’re all good now. Okay? So, we can all just actively repress everything that happened. I know we’re all good at that.”  
   
Natasha would have given anything to be present for that conversation. She knows neither of them will ever talk about it. At least not to her.  
   
“Also, we bought you a three-legged puppy.” Tony points at Barnes. “Play nice.”  
   
He leaves the room dramatically like always. Barnes looks at Steve and his eyes roll, but Steve just grins stupidly at him.   
   
Clint is the first to move. He pushes himself up off the counter, and goes over with his hand outstretched. “Sergeant Barnes.”  
   
“You can call me Bucky,” Barnes says, taking Clint’s hand and shaking it. “You all can. And if I ever hurt any of you … I’m sorry.”  
   
He does look like a puppy, a wounded one. Steve sort of twitches next to him, and Natasha can read in his face that he’s dying to gather Barnes up into his arms, but won’t do it in front of everybody. She knows, what they are to each other. She wonders if anyone else does. They’ve never mentioned it, if they do.  
   
“You couldn’t control it,” Wanda says kindly, and Steve smiles gratefully at her again.  
   
Barnes nods and doesn’t argue, even though he looks like he wants to.  
   
“We’re gonna get settled,” Steve decides, when no one else has anything to say. He nudges Barnes and the two of them exit the room.  
   
Natasha goes after them. She leaves with hushed voices behind her, discussing. She jogs to catch up, calling, “Steve,” to their backs.  
   
They both turn.  
   
“Are you and Stark really okay?”  
   
Steve grimaces a little, and Natasha knew Tony had been exaggerating. “I think we will be. It’s a lot to get over in one conversation.”  
   
“I did kill his parents,” Barnes says flatly.  
   
Natasha looks at him, and decides to be nice, because there’s no useful outcome in pointless hostilities. “The Winter Soldier killed his parents. You didn’t do anything.”  
   
“He knows that.” Steve looks at him pointedly. “Doesn’t he?”  
   
Barnes shrugs. “I guess.”  
   
It isn’t the first time they’ve had that fight, Natasha surmises. It likely won’t be the last time, either. She says to Barnes, “Wanda was right. We’re glad you’re here.”  
   
It’s not entirely the truth, or at least not all of it. Natasha is happy to see Steve smile again. She’s happy their team is back together, even if the current ties are tenuous at best and it will take a lot of time and effort to rebuild what they once had. She isn’t completely convinced it was necessary for Barnes to come here, when she knows the Wakandan King had made it clear Barnes was welcome to stay where he was. But, since no one asked for her opinion, she puts her best face on it.  
   
Steve claps her on the shoulder. “Thanks, Nat. Means a lot.”  
   
Barnes mumbles his gratitude as well, and then they’re turning and heading off in the direction of the bedrooms. Just as they’re rounding the corner, when Steve doesn’t think Natasha is looking anymore, he does put his arm around Barnes’ shoulders.  
   
For a week, Natasha watches. She’s highly trained in the art of it – knows how to read people’s facial and bodily expressions between the lines of what they say, to interpret the importance of the things they  _don’t_  say, to notice the tensing of shoulders or the clench of a fist or the twitch of a jaw muscle. She is more skilled than any of them at being quiet, and unseen; peeking around doorways or hovering just outside of rooms, eavesdropping and then retreating undetected. She watches, and listens, and notices.  
   
Barnes is so different when he’s around Steve. Natasha saw it right away, in moments where she was with them, sometimes with others present and sometimes not. The way Barnes is stoic, square-jawed, his eyes intense and his gaze unwavering, the ever-present haunt of ghosts behind his eyes, always sharply aware of his surroundings like he’s expecting to be attacked from all sides at any given moment. He’s standoffish with the others, not cold necessarily but distant, like he doesn’t trust them or expect that they trust him in return. He doesn’t relax, seemingly ever. She can imagine him actually sleeping with one eye open; having taught himself somehow to really do it, so he can always keep watch, always remain vigilant. It speaks to his training but also to his years on the run, and if she were the type to get emotional over the suffering of others, it would make her sad to think about. He’s broken in so many ways. Wanda was right that they’ve all suffered, but Barnes has the worst of any of them.   
   
But then, he’ll slip. Just for a moment. Steve will touch his shoulder, or smile at him, or say something to him, and the hardened mask slides away, just for long enough to be perceptible. Barnes will smile back, or his eyes will go soft, or he’ll touch back. And Natasha knows Tony gave him a bedroom of his own, but Barnes doesn’t sleep in it. He starts out there, but once he thinks the coast is clear, he tiptoes across the hall to Steve’s. She’s watched him do it from the shadows at the end of the corridor, six nights in a row. It’s a shame for Steve’s sake he put Sam on the case of finding his old friend instead of her. Natasha would have found him a lot sooner.  
   
She was curious, because this man is such a mystery and Steve never really talked about him. But she’s also a trained spy, and this is her home too, and the others’, and she felt like it was her duty to compile a dossier in her head on Barnes. To watch him, to catalogue his movements and his habits, to ensure he wasn’t going to be a danger to their team. To their home. Steve promised he’d been deprogrammed by a teenage genius with tech more impressive than Tony’s, but Steve is stupid when it comes to Barnes. He’s made a whole laundry list of terrible decisions that put the rest of them in danger, and even now he doesn’t seem to quite realize it. Steve doesn’t notice how irrationally he behaves when his oldest friend comes into the picture. She isn’t getting what she wants from just observing them around corners. They’re both too smart to let anything nefarious slip while they’re out in the open, in common spaces where anyone could walk in. She’s seen a few hugs, a few kissed cheeks, and a whole lot of mushy, doe-eyed expressions that settle right halfway between sweet and nauseating. One afternoon she watches them outside on the lawn, through the windows in the lounge. Steve tucks Barnes’ hair behind his ears and then kisses him. Barnes sends a worried look toward the wall of windows only a few yards away from them, but Steve shrugs, indicating he doesn’t care, so Barnes wraps his arm around Steve’s waist and kisses back. It’s nice, to see Steve not care. But it isn’t enough. She needs a lot more than that if she’s going to be sure Steve was right to bring the world’s deadliest assassin into their lives.  
   
She finds Tony in his lab, tinkering away as always at things he doesn’t tell them about, and usually they don’t ask. Bruce was the only one who ever asked.  
   
“Ms. Widow,” Tony greets, without looking up, as she enters the room.  
   
“I’d like access to the cameras,” she says, not beating around it.  
   
Tony does glance over his shoulder at her now, quirking an eyebrow. “What cameras?”  
   
She shoots an exasperated look at him. “Really?”  
   
“Really what?”  
   
“You really think we don’t know every square inch of this entire place is under 24-hour closed-circuit surveillance? You really think we’re that stupid?”  
   
Tony gestures vaguely in the space around them. “You see any cameras?”  
   
“No, and I can’t see your inflated ego either. Doesn’t mean it’s not there.”  
   
He stares at her, eyes narrowed, for just a moment, and then cracks a smile. “Okay. Busted. Good instincts, Romanoff.”  
   
“You think it’s just me? I’m telling you, everybody knows you’re watching us. Why do you think none of us ever bring dates back here?”  
   
“Well I would  _hope_  it’s more because this place is stuffed to the rafters full of top secret, dangerous, extremely classified information, not because you’re worried I’m sitting in a dark room somewhere getting my rocks off to you guys fucking somebody over a security camera.”  
   
“It’s a little of both,” she tells him honestly.  
   
“That’s disturbing,” he says. “If it helps, it really is just for security. It’s scrambled and catalogued and locked up behind a VPN the CIA couldn’t hack through, just so it’s there if we ever need it. I don’t watch the footage.”  
   
She skeptically raises an eyebrow. “Really?”  
   
“Oh my God.” He shakes his head. “Please tell me you’re kidding, please tell me you don’t actually think I sit around watching my friends sleep, or whatever the hell else you do in your bedrooms. Or is that the point, did you do something you want erased from the record? Who are you sleeping with, is it Wilson?”  
   
“Excuse me?” she snaps. “That is none of your business.”  
   
He laughs. “Oh, I see. It’s none of my business who you’re screwing in  _my_  building, and yet you’re standing here asking me for access to the cameras so you can spy on someone else? Who is it, who do you wanna watch?”  
   
She clenches her jaw, trying to size him up; to gauge whether he can even be trusted. She isn’t sure, in the end, but there’s no sense playing. “Barnes and Rogers.”  
   
His eyes flash and he grins wickedly. “Kinky. Hey, I’m generally partial to women, but I’ve still got a dick, and those two together? Yeah, I bet it’s pretty hot.”  
   
“I don’t want to watch them have sex, you pervert.” She rolls her eyes. Inwardly, she makes note that there’s at least one other person on their team who knows what Steve is doing behind closed doors with his childhood best friend. She’s still curious what everyone else knows, or suspects. “I want to watch  _Barnes_. I want to … make sure he isn’t a threat. Since we have invited him into our home on nothing but Steve’s word that he isn’t dangerous, I just think somebody should be making sure.”  
   
“You don’t believe Spangles, that he’s harmless now? I thought you two were besties.”  
   
“I believe … that Steve believes it. But that doesn’t necessarily make it true.”  
   
“You think Cap would put us in danger?”  
   
“Not on purpose. But he has a giant blind spot for this guy. Think about some of the shit he’s done in the last two years because of Barnes. He went against SHIELD and the government, he nearly got himself killed half a dozen times, basically told the U.N. to go fuck itself, he nearly killed  _you_.”  
   
Tony hums in amusement. “Not exactly Boy Wonder anymore, is he? Our little baby, all grown up and committing treason.”  
   
“I’m not necessarily saying I think he was wrong to do any of those things, but – ”  
   
“Hey, even trying to kill me?”  
   
“As if you weren’t trying to kill him first. For something you  _know_  Barnes had no control over.”  
   
Tony rolls his eyes. “He smashed my father’s face in, but sure, take his side.”  
   
“My point is, he isn’t Cap when Barnes is in the picture. He turns into somebody else, somebody who is reckless and emotional. He makes decisions with his heart instead of his head, and I don’t think we should be blindly trusting our security to that guy. His judgment is seriously compromised.”  
   
Tony hums again, as if he’s mulling it all over, weighing her words in his head, but then something in his face doesn’t quite make sense. He doesn’t look surprised at any of this, and Natasha narrows her eyes as it all clicks into place.  
   
“You’re already doing it, aren’t you?” she asks.  
   
Tony feigns innocence – poorly. “Doing what?”  
   
“You’re such a fucking liar,” she laughs, coldly. “Acting all offended when I suggested you might be watching the tapes. You  _are_  watching them. You wouldn’t let Barnes in here without some way of making sure he’s not gonna go rogue.”  
   
“First of all, they’re not tapes. Nobody has used a tape in twenty years.”  
   
“Recordings, then, whatever.”  
   
“I’m not watching them  _personally_. I have other shit to do, I don’t have the time or the desire to spend all day watching the two of them and their stupid soap opera. I developed a program to detect certain erratic behaviors.”  
   
Natasha narrows her eyes again. “What kind of behavior?”  
   
“Agitation. Being awake a lot in the middle of the night. Sneaking around in places where he isn’t supposed to be. Speaking in Russian or German. Looking too closely at my equipment. That sort of thing.”  
   
“You think that’s good enough?”  
   
“If you’re questioning my abilities we’re about to have a problem, Romanoff.”  
   
“I’m not questioning  _your_  abilities, you ego-maniac, I’m reminding you of his. Are you forgetting he was the most accomplished assassin in modern history? He killed dozens of people over multiple decades, in  _broad fucking daylight_ , and most of the global intelligence community didn’t even know he existed. We, collectively, didn’t stand a chance against him. If he hadn’t remembered Steve, he would have slipped through our fingers too and gone right back to being a shadow. You think he doesn’t have the ability to outsmart a computer program?”  
   
Eyeing her closely, Tony asks, “What exactly are you suggesting, here? You think, what, the Wakandans lied about deprogramming him? That him being here is somehow Hydra coming back from the dead and infiltrating us? That he’s just pretending to be gay for Capsicle so he can kill us all in our sleep?”  
   
“I don’t  _want_  to think any of those things, but I don’t know,” she answers honestly. “Which is the point. I don’t know, and neither do you. And Steve is not the best judge of character where Barnes is concerned, so as much as I like the guy, I’m not really comfortable leaving this up to him.”  
   
Tony snorts. He turns back around, going back to what he was doing on a stainless steel lab table when she walked in. “You can dress it up however you want, I’m still choosing to be offended you don’t think I’d keep you guys safe. But fine, have at it if you want. I’ll cast the files to the T.V. in your room. J.A.R.V.I.S., she has my permission to access the footage.”  
   
She grins to herself in victory. “You could watch with me, if you want.”  
   
“Sounds riveting but tragically I have better things to do.”  
   
Natasha keeps the retort on her tongue. She turns to go, when his voice rings out one last time.  
   
“Hey, Natasha. If I find out you’re watching them fuck each other, I’m definitely gonna tell Cap.”  
   
She smirks at him over her shoulder. “Back at ya.”  
   
Resisting the urge to run, Natasha walks at a measured pace and stops on her way through the lounge to chat with Clint. She excuses herself after long enough that it won’t seem suspicious, and then heads for her bedroom. She locks the door behind her. As promised, when sensing her presence, the T.V. turns on by itself, and there is a home screen with thumbnails waiting for her. She sits on the edge of her bed and waves her hand in the air, motion-sensor picking up her movements and scrolling through the files. It takes her a few minutes to work out Tony’s filing system. It’s all categorized by room, and date. Every video is thirty minutes long, timestamped, and tagged with details like the people present and keywords that Natasha assumes relate to the topics of conversation. It would be very easy to find a particular moment if one of them needed to, for reasons pertaining to security. Natasha has to hand it to Tony. It would also be very easy for someone with ill intentions to find precisely what they were looking for, should the files ever fall into the wrong hands. Natasha swallows the twinge of guilt. Her hands aren’t exactly the wrong ones, but they aren’t exactly the right ones either. She reminds herself she’s doing this to protect her friends, including Steve. He’s the one with the most to lose, if Barnes isn’t what he’s claiming to be.  
   
Instead of going through the back-catalogue, she decides to start with the live feed. She runs a search for their names, and finds them in Steve’s bedroom; thankfully, fully clothed. They’re on the bed. Steve is on his back, one hand tucked behind his head and the other around Barnes, who’s on his side with his head on Steve’s chest. His fingers are playing in the fabric of Steve’s shirt. She can’t see his face, it’s obscured by his hair and the angle of the camera. She can see Steve’s face, though. He looks sleepy and relaxed, the scowl that often sits on his lips gone and replaced with contentment.  
   
“They will,” he’s saying. His hand rubs Barnes’ back. “It’s only been a week.”  
   
“I’m not sure I care if they don’t like me,” Barnes replies.  
   
“I do. And they do like you.”  
   
“You know I shot Natasha, right?”  
   
“You remember that?”  
   
“Yes.”  
   
Natasha shakes her head to herself, and isn’t sure whether that makes her feel better about it.  
   
“Wasn’t your fault, Buck,” Steve tells him, his voice gentle and understanding. Natasha has never heard that voice before.  
   
“She still got shot.”  
   
“Wasn’t the first or last time. Nat can handle herself.”  
   
Natasha takes the compliment, weird as it is.  
   
Barnes sighs, and Steve brushes his hair back, so Natasha can see the side of his face for just a moment, before he pushes up onto his metal shoulder and looks away from the camera at Steve.  
   
“Not your fault,” Steve repeats.  
   
“I know that.”  
   
“Good.” The hand that was behind Steve’s head comes around to touch Barnes’ face, cupping his cheek. His lips move, but it’s too soft for Natasha to make out the words. She’s going to have to mention that to Tony. He needs to invest in higher quality microphones. Then Barnes leans in and kisses Steve, and Steve hugs his arm around Barnes’ back to haul him in closer. Natasha watches for a few moments longer before she remembers that she shouldn’t. It’s captivating, the way their lips move, the way their hands touch, Steve’s fingers combing gently through Barnes’ hair. It doesn’t seem to be leading anywhere; not a prelude to something more serious, just a quiet, affectionate moment. It’s tender and familiar and suddenly Natasha feels like she’d be viewing something less intimate if they  _were_  having sex. This seems to mean more. It’s like they’re saying things with their mouths sliding together that they could never say in actual words. It looks like communicating, and she shuts the video off abruptly. Her heart ends up racing, and a pit forms in her stomach. She shouldn’t have seen that.  
   
Curiosity gets the better of her after three days. For three days, she regretted having spied on them. For three days she goes back to observing only what they offer in public settings. Soft touches to lower backs that could be taken as platonic if she didn’t know any better. Softer smiles, eyes with stars in them, secret smirks across the dinner table like they’re wordlessly planning what they’re going to do to each other later. They really, really aren’t subtle, and Natasha knows she can’t be the only one who sees it. Tony catches her eye sometimes when they’re being particularly sweet, and rolls his back into his skull.  
   
They’re all watching the new Star Wars in the living room, draped over couches and chairs and each other, and halfway through the movie, Steve announces that he’s beat and heads off toward the wing where their rooms are. Natasha looks at Barnes, and then at Tony, who holds his hand up, five fingers spread. Natasha takes his bet and raises him, returning his gesture with three of her own fingers. He nods, and glances at his watch. Natasha isn’t wearing one so she counts seconds in her head. It isn’t even two minutes later that Barnes gets up, claiming to be on his way to the kitchen for something to drink, but then he sneaks to the shadows by the wall and follows after Steve. Tony snorts, loudly, and pretends to have something in his throat when he gets everyone’s attention.  
   
Natasha turns back to the movie, but Wanda, next to her on the couch, says quietly into her ear, so no one else can hear, “You know about them too?”  
   
Natasha presses her lips together, wanting to demand answers, but can’t think of a way to do that without raising suspicion. She whispers back that they’ll talk in the morning, and they do, over breakfast.  
   
“Are you in their heads?” she asks, and then instantly feels guilty for accusing someone else of spying when she’s doing it herself.  
   
“Not on purpose.” Wanda’s face scrunches regretfully. “I’m not trying to read any of you, it just happens by accident sometimes. I feel things when I stand too close.”  
   
A shudder runs through Natasha that she tries not to show. “Alright, so, whatever you’ve felt coming off me, let’s just never talk about it. But tell me about them.”  
   
Wanda’s eyebrows raise, and Natasha knows how that sounded.  
   
“I just want to make sure they’re okay. They’ve been through a lot. Especially Bar – Bucky.” Most of the others have been calling him by his chosen name so Natasha probably should as well, even though it’s such a cutesy nickname it doesn’t feel fitting on a man with his history.   
   
“He’s very sad,” Wanda says, with a soft sigh. “Haunted, by the things he was made to do. A very dark, turbulent energy comes off him. Except for when he’s near Steve. Then it gets all … rosy.”  
   
“You don’t think he’s dangerous, do you?” Natasha chews at the inside of her lip, and wonders why she hadn’t considered asking Wanda in the first place.  
   
“No. I can’t feel anything inside him that seems like it shouldn’t be there.”  
   
“Do you think you would? Feel it?”  
   
“I guess I can’t say for sure, but I assume so, yes.” Wanda sips thoughtfully at the steaming mug of peppermint tea clasped between her palms. “With brainwashing that severe, I think I’d sense foreign entities along with his natural aura. It wouldn’t feel human. I don’t sense anything like that. Just a fractured soul trying to piece itself back together.”  
   
“What about Steve?”  
   
“Steve is tortured by what happened to Bucky all those decades. He blames himself, for a lot things that aren’t his fault. And he loves him. A lot.” Wanda looks at her. “But you already knew that.”  
   
“He’s never outright told me. But. It’s hard to miss, even if you can’t read minds. The way they look at each other.”  
   
“You read faces. And body language. What do you see, when you watch them?”  
   
Clint enters the kitchen so Natasha doesn’t get to answer. It’s just as well. She isn’t sure what she would have said.   
   
“Mornin’ ladies.”  
   
“Why are you here?” Natasha asks, the thought suddenly hitting her. “We aren’t on assignment right now, why don’t you go home?”  
   
“Soon.” Clint helps himself to coffee. “Wanted to be here while the new guy got settled in.”  
   
“That’s nice of you,” Wanda tell him.  
   
Natasha narrows her eyes suspiciously, and Clint sees when he turns to face them.  
   
“Cap is our friend,” he says, a mildly patronizing lilt to his voice, like she’s a child he’s reminding to play nicely with the other kids in the schoolyard. “And the two of them have been through some shit. I thought it’d be good to have a united Avengers front for him, all of us here together, when he brought his boyfriend home.”  
   
Wanda coughs and smiles down at her cup.  
   
“Barton,” Natasha says imploringly.  _Tell us what you know_.  
   
Clint shrugs. “Oh, everybody knows. They’re really terrible at hiding it. Cap’s been skipping around this place like a kid at Disneyland.”  
   
Three days of watching as Barnes gets acclimated, and starts to open up a little, smiling more, that haunted look in his eyes fading at times. He starts speaking in sentences longer than two words. She’s on the patio with them as Wanda demonstrates her magic for him. Natasha sees Barnes’ wide eyes, fascinated and captivated, as Wanda bends light and air and picks up a boulder outside to set it down gently two feet to the left. Natasha listens as Wanda tells Barnes about her brother, certainly in a generous attempt to show him that he isn’t the only one here with trauma coloring his past. As she wipes her eyes, Barnes puts a sympathetic hand on her forearm. It’s the very first time Natasha has seen him touch someone who isn’t Steve. She watches a few days later as Barnes and Clint shoot pool in the lounge, Barnes struggling with only one arm but laughing about it, and Clint agreeing to even the odds by keeping his own left arm behind his back. The rest of them are across the room chatting, and every few minutes Natasha notices Steve look over at Barnes, and the smile on his face is so fond it could melt ice.  
   
Natasha comes to the conclusion without returning to the videos that she was wrong, and he isn’t a threat to their safety. Whatever the teenage genius did, she did it well. When curiosity gets the better of her, it isn’t because she’s worried for their security. It’s because she needs to see more. Clint is right, they are terrible at hiding it, but they’re still  _trying_  to hide it, and Natasha wants to see it. She wants to understand what this man means to Steve, what they mean to each other. Her softer side, usually so carefully hidden away under all the layers she wraps herself in for self-preservation, wants to see what a love that could last through decades apart would look like up close.  
   
She doesn’t watch them live again. Too easy to accidentally catch them doing something she wouldn’t feel right about seeing. She locks herself in her room for hours at a time, scrolling back through the last ten days and using keyword searches to find gentler moments. The two of them in the middle of the night, wrapped up together in Steve’s bed. Steve hugs his arms around Barnes so protectively, like he’s shielding him from the world, even in sleep. A bad nightmare; Barnes thrashing and yelling and dripping in sweat, Steve frantically shaking him awake and then scooping him into his arms, murmuring to him while Barnes’ shoulders shake. Alone in the kitchen, afternoon sun filtering in through the windows, she watches Steve make Barnes laugh, bright and joyful. She watches Steve take a bite out of a piece of toast with peanut butter, offer Barnes a bite, and then kiss him before either of them have fully swallowed their mouthfuls. It must be sticky but Steve looks so happy. Natasha can’t recall ever seeing him smile like that.  
   
Barnes alone in their room, sitting on the floor in front of the full-length mirror and just staring at his reflection. There are a number of videos of him doing that. He just looks into the glass, sometimes for close to an hour. Natasha wonders what he’s seeing. If he’s imagining himself with the Winter Soldier’s black mask covering his mouth, imagining that face streaked with the blood of a victim. Or, if he’s looking at the face he has now; at the soft, short beard and tanned skin and pulled-back hair. If he’s staring into his own eyes, trying to remember who he is. To separate the memories of his real self away from the memories of the machine he’d been turned into. One time, Steve walks in while he’s doing it, and a look of sheer heartbreak passes over his features before he closes the door behind himself and joins Barnes on the floor, behind him, his legs on either side of Barnes’ slightly smaller frame.  
   
“Tell me what you see,” he said, wrapping his arms around Barnes’ waist and kissing the side of his face.  
   
“Steve,” Barnes sighed.  
   
“Please?”  
   
“A mess,” Barnes admitted, sadly. “A cold-blooded killer. A monster.”  
   
“I see the boy from Brooklyn who always had my back, no matter what.” Steve rested his chin on Barnes’ shoulder. “I see the man who took care of me after my parents died even though I fought him every step of the way. The man who fought back through decades of mind-control and turned on Hydra. I see the guy I’ve loved since I was old enough to know what that meant.”  
   
Barnes’ eyes closed, and Natasha saw the moment he surrendered and relaxed back into Steve’s chest.  
   
“You’re the best person I know. The bravest, too. You ever got voices in your head tellin’ you otherwise, send me after ‘em. I’ll beat ‘em up for you,” Steve promised, his New York accent slipping in like it does sometimes when he’s exhausted.  
   
Barnes’ hand had reached up behind them and tangled into Steve’s hair, and Steve kissed his neck. Natasha had switched the video off, at that point. It felt like the first time – intimate in a much more profound way than watching them kiss. She’d always known Steve would do anything for Barnes, had been carrying a torch for him since 1945, but the full extent of what these two mean to each other was unexpected. The lengths Steve would go to protect him goes so much deeper than physical, and she suspects Barnes is the same way.  
   
One afternoon, a mouse chewing through some electrical wires causes Tony’s security system to malfunction and sets off the alarm. Natasha jumps into action, with everyone else, guns out and senses heightened as they sweep the building before discovering it to be a false alarm. In the chaos, she doesn’t notice Steve and Barnes disappear, but when the dust settles and they’re nowhere to be found, Natasha hurries to check the footage. She watches Barnes stiffen as the alarm sounds and then watches his whole demeanour change, from relaxed to tense, happy to terrified. It’s difficult to hear over the shrill ringing of the siren but the words he’s tersely muttering don’t sound English. Steve doesn’t follow the rest of them as they all run out of the room in different directions. He shakes Barnes urgently, patting his cheek and pleading with him,  _you’re here with me, Buck, you’re safe. Come back to me, listen to my voice, I got you_ , all the while looking frantically over his shoulders, clearly expecting an intruder to burst into the room at any minute. When the alarm quiets and Tony’s voice over the intercom announces it had been a mechanical failure, Barnes does seem to return to himself a little, and Steve drags him off to their bedroom. Natasha switches the video to the live feed for the first time since the very first time, and sure enough, they’re in bed, Barnes burrowed into Steve’s arms so completely she can barely see him, and Steve kissing his face and whispering in his ear. It isn’t difficult to discern what happened. Sam said it might.  
   
Mostly, Natasha watches in astonishment as she comes to realize, as the days go by, that the person she thought she knew in Steve Rogers was only a part of who the man really is. He’s different too, around Barnes, in a way that takes her completely by surprise. He’s gentler, smiles more, laughs louder. He’s attentive, always reaching for Barnes or checking in on him or looking around to make sure he hasn’t gone too far away. In a few rare moments, Natasha watches them lying in their bed with Steve in the hot seat instead of Barnes; talking about his own struggles and traumas and perceived shortcomings. Steve is so vulnerable in those moments. In all the years they’ve known each other, Natasha has never seen him anywhere close vulnerable before. Not once. She’s seen him upset. When Peggy Carter died, he was upset. When they found out the Winter Soldier was his best friend in the world, Steve was beyond upset. But this is different. This is opening old wounds just for the sake of letting someone else care for him. This is Steve shedding his Captain America skin and letting himself be weak and knowing that Barnes will love him anyway. It’s a lot more meaningful than being sad at a funeral. It takes a level of trust that Steve doesn’t have with anyone else.  
   
Pounding on her door startles Natasha, and she considers pretending to be asleep and ignoring it. It is nearly 11pm so it wouldn’t be unreasonable for her to have already gone to bed. Then, Tony’s voice travels through the door – steel and bolts, like all the doors are in this building. Bulletproof and impenetrable.  
   
“Open up, Nat. I know you’re awake.”  
   
Natasha flicks her fingers toward the T.V., shutting down the video she’d been watching of Steve and Barnes cooking dinner together from the night before, moving around each other to reach for spices and cutting boards, brushing against each other as they do, Barnes getting distracted halfway through chopping a green pepper and abandoning it to kiss Steve’s neck until a chuckling Steve gave in, turned around and kissed him for real. The screen goes dark, and Natasha smoothes her hair out with her fingers and then opens the door.  
   
Tony smirks at her before it’s even fully opened. “Having fun?”  
   
“I was about to go to bed.”  
   
Tony’s eyes travel down her body, taking in the fact that she’s still fully dressed, makeup on her face and heeled boots on her feet. “Yeah, I can see that. So? Gimme the deets, which one of them bottoms?”  
   
Natasha frowns. “What?”  
   
He rolls his eyes, as if to say  _come on_. “You’re telling me you’re really not watching them screw?”  
   
“I’m really not.” Natasha laughs at the absurdity of the question.  
   
An eyebrow raises demurely. “Not even once?”  
   
“Not even ever.”  
   
“Well then what the hell else could they possibly be doing that is so captivating?”  
   
She opens and closes her mouth, not understanding. “What are you talking about?”  
   
He nudges her back so he can enter the room, shutting and locking the door behind him. “Here’s the thing, Princess. I like to have a rough idea of where you guys are at all times, just in case there’s a situation where we need a head-count. So I know that you’ve been shut away in here a lot the last two weeks, and I also know what you’ve been doing, because the system keeps track of what’s being viewed on the playback function. You’ve been in here for two weeks watching the Many Adventures of Spangles and Robocop. So, c’mon. Spill it. What the hell are they up to that’s kept your attention for so long? Are they running a cartel outta Steve’s bedroom?”  
   
Natasha exhales and realizes she’s been caught. She sits back on the bed, moving her fingers to restart the video she’d just been watching. They kiss in the kitchen, Steve pressing Barnes into the counter and then scooping his hands under Barnes’ armpits to lift him up onto it. Barnes laughs, and protests disingenuously about being manhandled.  
   
“Sometimes I miss when you weighed 90 pounds soaking wet.”  
   
“Sometimes?” Steve asks, and it comes out suggestive in his low voice.  
   
Barnes beams. “Not that often.”  
   
They kiss again, Barnes’ hand pushing up under Steve’s shirt, and Steve’s fingers in his hair, angling his face to deepen the slide of their lips together.  
   
“Had another good talk with Wanda today,” Barnes says, as Steve breaks their embrace to pepper kisses along his jaw. “She said she’s never seen you happy like you have been lately.”  
   
“Did she,” Steve muses.  
   
“That true?”  
   
Steve looks back up at him, smiling affectionately and brushing the backs of his knuckles lovingly over Barnes’s cheek. “Might be.”  
   
“Even though I’m still fucked up?” Barnes asks, expression going sad and regretful for just a moment.  
   
Steve kisses his lips tenderly, keeping Barnes’ face close to his as he murmurs, “There isn’t anything in the world that could make me stop loving you.”  
   
They don’t kiss again, but they stay wrapped up in each other like that, pressed closed together and foreheads touching. The bed next to Natasha dips as Tony blows a noisy breath out and sits next to her.  
   
“So, they’re not  _just_ fucking,” he concludes, sounding taken aback by it.  
   
“You’ve really never watched any of this?” Natasha asks incredulously.  
   
“Believe it or not, I like having you guys here. I like this family. I wasn’t gonna fuck it up by spying on you and driving everyone away.”  
   
“Tony Stark is a better person than me,” she says, the familiar twinge of guilt in her stomach. She should never have started watching them in the first place, but now it’s a fixation and she can’t seem to stop.  
   
“You want that on a trophy?” he grins at her sideways.  
   
“You know, I figured out pretty quick that Barnes wasn’t dangerous. The rest of this time, I’ve been watching Steve. Because I thought I knew him pretty well. We’ve been fighting together for years, we’ve run a bunch of missions just the two of us. I’ve told him things I don’t tell very many people. I know he’s done the same. But there is this entire side of him that I knew nothing about. That none of us have ever seen.”  
   
On the screen, Steve and Barnes have parted and gone back to chopping vegetables and stirring sauce, but they keep tossing secret, satisfied smiles at each other. Natasha pauses the video.  
   
“How mushy do they get?” Tony wrinkles his nose.  
   
“It’s almost like he’s a different person. He’s  _happy_  with Barnes, in a way he never was with us.”  
   
“Disgusting,” Tony says, but he doesn’t mean it.  
   
“Seems like when Barnes died in the war, a chunk of Steve died with him. Steve came to us incomplete. He wasn’t just missing his friend, or his old life, all these years. He was missing a part of himself.”  
   
“Pretty damn flowery for a Russian spy. Planning on a second career writing romance novels, are we?”  
   
“Hey, you asked.” Natasha crosses her legs. She agrees, though. She’s become way too sappy these last two weeks.  
   
“Let’s see what they’re up to now.” Tony flicks his wrist at the screen before Natasha can stop him, and Steve and Barnes appear back in Steve’s bedroom.   
   
They’re both in their underwear. Steve is doing push-ups on the floor, and Barnes is sprawled diagonally across the bed, scrolling with his thumb over the phone Tony had given him. Natasha has honestly no desire to sleep with either of them, but she’s still a human with eyes, and it’s still almost a slap in the face to be hit with the image of the two of them nearly naked. Bulging muscles in Steve’s back ripple hypnotically as he raises and lowers himself on his knuckles. Barnes is a bit leaner, but he’s still a treat to look at, curved biceps and thick thighs and a nearly pornographic cut of muscle along his hipbones. The metal covering his shoulder meets his skin with jagged, angry scarring surrounding it. Instead of pity for what he’s been through, Natasha finds herself impressed that he was able to withstand everything Hydra threw at him and still walk away mostly in tact. His entire identity was supposed to have been erased. Instead, he’s here, knowing who he is and remembering his past, and whole in the ways that matter. She barely knows this man and she’s strangely proud of him. She sees in him a kind of strength that she would like to think is in her, as well.  
   
“Have you heard of Twitter?” he’s asking.  
   
Steve chuckles. “Yes. Stay away from it.”  
   
“God, they’re so ancient,” Tony grumbles. “Has Barnes spent a single night in his own bedroom?”  
   
“Not that I’m aware of.”  
   
“I’m taking it back, then. We could use the storage.”  
   
On the screen, Barnes puts his phone down on the bed next to him. “Distract me,” he says to Steve, an edge to his voice like it’s a challenge.  
   
Steve looks over at him, halting exercising the moment Barnes says to and getting up. He drapes himself over Barnes, covering his body, and Barnes pulls him in to slide their lips together. The kiss turns heated and frantic almost instantly, and they can’t keep their hands off each other. Natasha nearly chokes on her own saliva when she notices Steve’s hips rocking down, pushing into Barnes quick and almost rough.  
   
“We shouldn’t be watching this,” she says, but makes no move to turn it off.  
   
“Can’t believe you wanna go again already,” Steve says on the screen, half like he really can’t believe it, and half like it’s a reverent, worshipful prayer – like the man underneath him is such a miracle that Steve couldn’t find the words to express it if he spoke a dozen languages.  
   
“You’re the one gettin’ all sweaty down there on the floor without me,” Barnes returns, smug smile accompanied by his hand drifting down Steve’s back to cup his ass.  
   
“You should work out with me,” Steve says. He sucks at Barnes’ neck as he does. The smacking sounds are obscene. “Can’t have you getting rusty.”  
   
“Yeah, yeah.” Barnes rolls his eyes. “Shut up and fuck me before I change my mind.”  
   
“Okay,” Natasha cries, shutting it off. She looks at Tony, who’s grinning from ear to ear like a kid on Christmas.  
   
“Barton owes me fifty bucks.”  
   
Natasha blinks. “You bet him on which one of them …? No, you know what, don’t tell me.”  
   
“If you’re about to get uppity over respecting people’s privacy, I’ll remind you that you’ve been using them as your own personal Lifetime drama for the last two weeks.” Tony whistles and stands up, making his way toward the door.  
   
She points threateningly at him. “You better not be going back to your lab to watch the rest of this. I will tell Steve and he’ll make you bleed.”  
   
Tony grins again. “Of course not,” he quips, and then he’s gone, and Natasha really can’t tell whether he was joking.  
   
Once he’s left, she says, “J.A.R.V.I.S.? Disable my access to the security camera footage.”  
   
“Right away, Ms. Romanoff,” the A.I. answers politely.  
   
Natasha gives it a few seconds and then tries to access the videos again, and is pleased when she can’t. She’s finished with them. It’s already gone on longer than it should have. She got what she wanted, and then some. She determined Barnes had really been freed of his programming. She discovered, unexpectedly, that Steve has been made whole again by the return of the pieces of himself he thought he’d lost forever. All she’d wanted was for him to be happy, in those months before Barnes resurfaced when she’d tried in vain to set him up with other agents from SHIELD Now, he is. She doesn’t need anything more.  
   
The next morning, she finds Barnes in the kitchen, fiddling with the coffee maker. His hair is pulled into a messy knot at the crown of his skull, with enough pieces falling astray to suggest he’d slept like that. He’s in basketball shorts and a hooded sweatshirt, both of which Natasha recognizes as belonging to Steve. She doesn’t mention that.  
   
“Add enough water for me?” she requests. “Morning, Sergeant.”  
   
He glances at her over his shoulder, and nods. “I wish you’d call me Bucky,” he says, back turned to her again as he fills the coffee pot with water from the tap.  
   
She sits at the table. “Why?”  
   
For a moment, he doesn’t answer. He scoops finely ground coffee beans into the filter, and then slides it closed and flicks the switch. The machine starts to gurgle as it percolates. Barnes picks up two bananas from the bowl next to the fridge, and sits across from Natasha at the table. He hands her one, and then splits open the other with his teeth and takes a bite. Once he swallows, he says, “Because that’s who I was before everything. Before I fell, before Hydra. I’m trying to get that person back.”  
   
Natasha strips the peel from the fruit and takes a bite as well, chewing thoughtfully. She hadn’t considered it in those terms before, and now feels badly about resisting it. “That’s a good reason. Okay, you got a deal.”  
   
“I know I shot you, once,” Bucky says, wincing. “I’m sorry.”  
   
Natasha shakes her head. More than ever, she truly believes it when she says, “It wasn’t you. Not really.”  
   
“Steve is pretty crazy about you. I’d be really … honored, if we could be friends. But I get it, if that’s unrealistic.”  
   
She shrugs. “I can’t hold a lifelong grudge against everyone who’s ever shot at me. And Steve is … he seems pretty crazy about you, too.”  
   
Bucky looks at her, slightly squinted eyes. He gets up as the coffee maker stops spitting, pouring the steaming liquid into two mugs and setting them, one by one, on the table. He brings the carton of milk over, last, pouring a generous amount into his mug and then offering it to Natasha. He doesn’t sit back down, but leans against the counter. It’s almost the same spot Natasha had seen him sitting on, kissing Steve, only last night on her television.  
   
“You know about that?” Bucky asks quietly. It isn’t really a question.  
   
“I do.” Natasha nods, and doesn’t tell him that everyone knows. She’ll leave him to find that out on his own time.  
   
“Does it make things weird?”  
   
“Not on my end.”  
   
Bucky presses his lips together, and looks down into the coffee mug in his hands.  
   
Natasha chews at the inside of her cheek. There is so much she can never, ever tell him about the last two weeks. For the sake of them both, and Steve as well. They’d never be able to look each other in the eye ever again. She settles on half the truth. “I’ve been sorta watching the two of you lately. Just like, whenever we’re all in a room together. And … I knew Steve for a long time before you came back, and it wasn’t all doom and gloom, we had our moments, but overall he wasn’t happy. I’ve never really seen him happy, until now. He really loves you. And you seem to really love him back, and I care about him, and it’s really good to see him like this.”  
   
The smile that curls Bucky’s lips is small, but genuine. He doesn’t say anything further, but Natasha can distinguish all she needs to know from the expression on his face. She finishes the rest of the banana in a few large bites, and then takes her coffee with her and she leaves the kitchen. She runs into Steve on her way out, messy-haired and shirtless.  
   
“Good morning,” she says, cheerfully. “Your boyfriend made coffee.”  
   
She walks away smirking at the look of shock on Steve’s face.

**Author's Note:**

> [follow me on tumblr if you want!](http://paper-storm.tumblr.com/)


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